Predatory Sea

Long before the Atlantic slave trade reached its height, racialized slavery in the early modern world was already taking shape through captive-taking and human trafficking in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Caribbean. The Predatory Sea is the first full-length study of how closely captivity and colonialism were bound together in that period.

From 1570 to 1670, privately funded ship captains, sailors, merchants, and adventurers of several nationalities raided coastal communities and regional shipping across the Caribbean. Their victims included free people and people who had previously been enslaved, of African and Indigenous descent, who were carried off into slavery far from the communities where they belonged. From the 1570s the raiders set up maritime bases on small, strategically placed islands. For northern European traffickers, these anchorages served as temporary settlements, decades before their monarchs authorized formal colonies. Colonization therefore began with captive-taking and trafficking, and both stayed central to the growth of the first English and French colonies in the region.

Casey Schmitt draws on research in Spanish, French, and English archives in Europe and the Caribbean to show how captivity and maritime violence shaped early English, French, and Dutch settlement. Reading across the records of rival empires, she also recovers the experiences of the people caught up in this trade.

Many captives escaped to Spanish population centers and told officials what they had seen in the early English, French, and Dutch colonies. Their testimony helped drive a series of Spanish attacks on foreign settlements in the Caribbean in the decades before the 1650s. Schmitt argues that captives were both a cause and a consequence of the rivalry and warfare among European empires during this violent century. In her account, this captive economy shaped English and French colonization, imperial competition, and the daily lives of captives and captors alike.